#637 - Tony Volk - The Evolutionary Psychology Of Bullying

29:36And the honestly humility thing, I find myself being quite orderly. I don't break rules very much. And I think that that like procedural classic British stand -in -align follow the rules and procedures thing. I think that's definitely something that I've got in me quite strongly. I don't tend to break rules very much. I have a massive amount of guilt and shame when I do stuff. I do feel like pretty bad about fucking people over. If I say something that's mean that I know it's probably hurt someone or maybe even hasn't hurt them, but I'll worry about whether or not it has. So that's in there. And then when you were talking about the the bullies Not using that and being able to kind of Precision strike derogate.

30:24I was smaller When I was in school even though a little bigger now Would have been not dumber. I would have been probably smart or smarter on average than most of the kids certainly most of the kids that were bullying me But significantly less socially adept So I think high scores a lot of the time, like let's say that I outperformed a bunch of the bullies in a test or got higher grades or was moved up a class or did whatever. That would become also a justification for bullying down the line. So, yeah, I think that to like trying to map what I've learned from you onto my experience in school, I think I really had kind of a perfect storm of a lack of physical verminability and some pretty high social isolation coupled with lack of social capability that just made me like an absolute perfect target.

31:22Yeah, and there's a number of things to dive into there, but I think the first and most important is victims recognizing that it's not their fault. Bullies are going through, it's almost like the terminator walking with this little scanning list saying, who's a good target, who's a good target, there's the right target. It's not something that you did. There are sometimes victims that we call provocative victims who are sometimes bully victims themselves. And I should qualify now that when I'm talking about bullies, I'm talking about kids who who are primarily bullies and not victims as well. Kids who are both bullies and victims, they're like the Nelson months, as they have bad social skills, they've deregulated, et cetera.

32:01How common are they? Yeah, I just can say, they don't do most of the bullying. Estimates are less than 30%, 78 % of the bullies, bullying that's done is done by the really dominant kids. And so they're picking in a very cowardly way, somebody that can't effectively fight back. The kids were picking on Luforig, no might have been smaller, but they knew that he couldn't respond without, you know, looking more socially awkward. The only way he can defend himself is by punching his, his guy's slow and no social skills. So it's a very... Calus, very calculated predatory way of achieving what you want.

32:47Whereas on the opposite end, if you're high in honesty humility, you have what you said, you believe in fairness, you know, it's in some of your interviews, you try and present a balanced view, you don't take advantage of people when the opportunity presents itself. And that's so much more important than we often hear that it's an anger issue or a lack of emotional empathy. And those really aren't strongly correlated at all with bullying, especially emotional empathy. And if you look at almost any action hero that's been in Hollywood from the 80s onward, even before that Clint Eastwood, they all have the profile of their very low in emotionality and empathy, their very low in agreeableness, but they're high in honesty humility.

33:30These are good people until you piss them off. Yeah, they've got that noble side to them, right? Right, and it's that nobility, that's why we like them in a sense that, yes, you think John Wick, how many people he's killed in his series? He's a dog dog. That's a fucking dog, that's a lesson. But we still like him because he's honorable. And he has that sense with him. And that is really the biggest cost that we found for bullying is that while they are very good at getting what we call dominance or popularity, people don't like them. And that's because people can recognize what they're doing. So the head cheerleader is intimidating.

34:16The capital football team is intimidating, but you don't really want to spend a lot of time with them unless you're directly gaining from their power. Yeah, then we trickle down effective whatever good social halo they've got going on. Okay, so what about the ages of bullying? What age does bullying peak? Is there a difference? You already mentioned physicality kind of adjusts over time But what about if we roll forward from school into adulthood the workplace the the neighborhood etc Yeah, so we have colleagues a Jamie Austro in Buffalo Studies actually bullying in the preschool so we know that It exists early on and some other colleagues have shown that babies might have a basic understanding of power and balances in interactions.

35:06So it probably starts pretty early. We know that in children and adolescents, it peaks right around the age of 13 to 14. And the data isn't 100 % lined up, whether that's because when you're usually transitioning schools and so you have to reassert yourself or whether it's because of puberty. but most of the evidence is coming down on the side of Puberty. That once the mating game starts, bullying kicks up another year. That there's a whole new level of seriousness, which means between the ages about 13 to 15 is when bullying peaks. It decreases, but it does continue on into adulthood. being a bully in high school or elementary school is predictive of being a bully in the workplace.

35:58Almost certainly in my opinion because the shared underlying traits of honesty humility, which for different but similar reasons are also the lowest in adolescence it looks like. That's when we bottom out in honesty humility. It's a time when you separate from your families are thinking about yourselves. So it could explain why somebody like the individual you mentioned was a jerk then and it isn't a jerk later now that they've grown up a little. But there are many jerks who persist into adulthood and are happy to continue bullying people throughout adulthood. So childhood bullying is predictive of adult bullying as well.

36:39Some people will age out of it but not everybody will. I have to say one of the things that Okay, before I say that, is there any correlation that you have found between the family's socioeconomic status, the presence of a father in the home, race differences, family environment, stuff like that? I'm trying to separate out this honesty humility thing from some of the more environmental factors. Yeah, so father in the home, we've looked at briefly and I've done other work, say on Pubertyll maturation and father in the home that I think shoots down that hypothesis, even though I kind of backed it up in the past.

37:22Bad neighborhoods and competitive environments exacerbate bullying. What's a competitive environment? So where people endorse competitive attitudes, that status really matters. Winning is more important than having fun, things like that. That increases bullying, having role models who bully, increases bullying. There is a really interesting study that was done by some colleagues in, I believe it was North Carolina and North Carolina is a purple state. And in 2016, they did a study in 2015 and 2017. And then the districts that went hard read from Trump a year after. So from 2015 to 2017, there was an increase in racialized bullying in those districts, which why and only those districts, our assumption is they're copying their role model and what their role model is doing.

38:21So role models matter. The really interesting thing about SCS, which typically being poor is associated with risk factors. Not bullying. It's the opposite. Wealthier kids are more likely to be bullies. And the reason for that is because they have power. If you're the kid who has the best clothes and you just came back from Europe and kids can come over to your house and go, you know, jet skiing the college, then you have a lot of power that you can use over kids who don't have that. So we actually see that higher SES is a risk factor for bullying. Right. So I'm just trying to think that the kids who have more, that are higher in socioeconomic status that have more resources at home, this isn't necessarily due to the fact that the lessons and world view that they have is I can do things and not have repercussions.

39:24It is more that they have given this baseline of just higher status and from this higher status it means that there are a greater number of people to punch down. That's kind of an interesting way to do it. So I've got it in my head, you know that famous graph, the hypergamy graph of sort of men dating across but then women only kind of dating up. I'm kind of seeing the same thing, but for bullying, where, you know, number one can bully everybody down, but number five can only bully from number five down and number ten can only bully from number ten down. It's very difficult to bully up. So the people that are higher up in terms of socioeconomic status have a larger pool of other people from which to bully.

40:03Yeah. I also suspect that you're right that some of it, although our early analysis don't suggest if we're doing more refined analysis. I think some of it is going to come from the parents. Wealth is correlated with the same sort of arrogant attitudes of winner take all. Hi, cut it takes. Yeah, first place and then there's losers. To balance out our samples, for example, when we work with undergraduates, we always get students from the business school because they're habitually lower in honesty humility because it's a cut through a world in business, right? It's doggy dog, winner takes all. So some of that is certainly trickling down from parents.

40:43But one of the really interesting studies we did was showing that maternal monitoring, and maternal just because women are an average primary caregivers, but you get to caregiver monitoring, is associated with the reduction in bullying. But then we split that between kids who are high in honesty humility and kids who are low in honesty humility. Kids who are high in honesty humility, it didn't make any difference at all. They are always low in bullying. So if you're a good sensible kid, it doesn't really matter what your parents are doing or monitoring you because you're not going to be tempted to take advantage of other kids.

41:21It was when the kids were low in honesty humility themselves. And of course, there's going to be shared genetic and environmental influences from the parents along those lines. but for kids who were low and honestly humiliated, whose parents didn't watch them, then they were the ones who, by far, engaged in the most bullying. What do you think's happening there? Just a lack of supervision and a disposition that tends you towards being like breaking rules and social norms and stuff, without the parent there, you're more likely to succumb to your base instincts. Yeah, exactly. And it's also potentially, if you want to be Mac, the alien about it, It might be more sensible for the parents to suggest more subtle ways of gaining power.

42:07Because bullying can still, especially in some modern environments, land you in trouble. Schools have very poor records in general in dealing with bullying. But I think that's really what's underlying. It is that without parents there to guide the child, those instincts are kicking in. to go for the throat. And they do. Just to reiterate what you said earlier on, fatherless homes you haven't managed to find a particularly strong correlation? No. Single parents, single parenting doesn't seem to be a major predictor. Again, probably because if the cause of the single home isn't honesty humility, stress in and of itself isn't going to make a good person turn bad.

43:01We tend to see what's the conscientiousness if that gets lower, then yes you engage in more risk taking behavior, but that risk taking behavior doesn't turn in a dark direction unless you have the dark predispositions. So if you get a, once you start loading up all kinds of different factors, Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's so interwoven, man. It's so interesting. I love it. I love how how Complex it is it really does seem though, you know that as with everything behavioral genetics comes and Smashes all of your ideas in the face but Just you've got a lot of raw materials and you have a disposition and there are things that you can do to kind of nudge it around but Really you kind of are the way you are There was something that you said before, first off, I'm realizing the reason I probably didn't lose my virginity until the age of 17 is because I got bullied in school, which I don't know whether that's an advantage or a disadvantage to have an X -ray or under my belt before I decided to have sex.

44:06The relationship between alcohol use and bullying was something that I thought was super, super interesting, especially coming from the UK or country where the age of legal age for drinking is 18 is supposed to 21. Yeah, it's a great question. And the answer is with everything it's complicated. So for example, kids in China, these other major predictor in Chinese bullying is conscientiousness. So willing us to plan ahead, think long term versus being impulsive, lazy, et cetera, that doesn't show up in North American data. And we think that's because in China, where many schools have in local parentists, which means they can act like parents, the punishments for bullying are much more severe.

44:58So if a kid's caught bullying, they have the power to physically discipline the child, toss the child out of class, expel. You're kidding me, you can get spanked in China still. Yeah, I'm not gonna say I know every school in China, It's a big country, but in the schools we work with yet.

45:22The in North America, we tend to find its low agreeableness, being angry is associated with it. Probably because it's not as risky a behavior. So it's not showing up with just these really impulsive kids. Having said that, alcohol is associated with an increase in all kinds of anti -sociality because it releases impulsivity. So I'd expect it to be a bigger effect in China and it would be in North America or in the UK. But I would suspect that alcohol use would both increase bullying directly as well as correlate with the general pattern of anti -sociality. That's another thing. You're also going to have probably the people who do start drinking sooner will have a social group, very few 15, 16, 17 year olds are drinking in the house on their own.

46:10It's your part of a group. That means if you are part of a group, you probably got status. that means that you have this. Let's call it the bullying pool. The bullying pool has been opened up for you a little bit. I also, to fold another thing into the Chinese discussion, Asian people suck at drinking. Asian people are not good at drinking. And that may be another racial difference. One other thing I forgot to ask you about the family setup, I'm going to guess that only children are more likely to be bullied than children that have got brothers or sisters and or cousins that live in the neighborhood or go to the same school.

46:52Yeah, I would have thought the same thing But the date on that is is ambiguous and I think that's partly because Data shows that being bullied at home is correlated with being bullied at school And so if you're older brother or sister and sibling bullying is a newer area of research, it's not my area of research, but what's been done seems to show that it's as toxic as being bullied by strangers. So if your older brother or sister is picking on you, that A might vary over into school, and B, your behavior and reaction to other kids might carry over into school making you a more appealing victim.

47:33So it's not the protective factor that we thought. In that, I'm sure it is in some cases, if you've got a good older brother or sister who looks at you. Mediated by what the relationship with the siblings is like. Yeah, so double edged, I guess is the short way of saying it. Having siblings, so many other categories, with bullying, it's a double edged sort. Is bullying, okay, so getting into the sort of more ancestral reasons we've spoken about kind of, I guess the school yard mostly. I'm gonna guess that bullying must have been used ancestral to foster social cohesion in one form or another. What else that and then what else was it useful?

48:17Similar things getting resources. So you want that piece of meat. A lot of hunter -gatherers divide their meat equally. Well, you bullied people to giving your family better meat or more meat. You bullied the people across hills, not to come in hunting your territory. even though you go into theirs on occasion. You interrogate the reputations of competitors, especially in adolescence when you're getting ready to enter that dating pool. You don't wanna be with her, she's not faithful. Interestingly, one of the things that really tuned me into the evolutionary research is a book by Jean Briggs, never an anger.

48:57And it's a book about her life with the Labrador Inuit, the Eskimochi, is going to let the Inuit are. And they have a social norm that you're not allowed to express anger, which is probably really useful if you're living in an A -glue and it's minus 40 and if somebody gets pissed and you break the wall, it really frees the death. So, you're not allowed to get angry, but they still bullied. There was a main group of people who stuck together and there was a smaller group and the main group would make fun of the smaller group, talk about how stingy they were, they didn't share, they weren't as social or friendly.

49:37And then the main group had a bit of a food shortage and had to rely on the weaker group, right? things around and there's some really interesting dynamics but there's a case where that group versus group theme which is a really powerful driver of human behavior it is very easy to turn one group against another which is something we're looking at in adolescence it's trickier to do but we're really interested in seeing what happens when two groups start bullying each others with your members. My guess is that either fades away or very quickly escalates. Talk to me about how social media has changed the landscape of bullying.

50:25Yeah, social media. I'm really not a fan of. You know, I heard somebody describe it well. There's Max Tegman that it's our first experiment with AI interfering with our lives and it did not go well. The algorithms that it uses are not friendly. So there's a number of impacts. The first and most obvious is that it's made it really hard to track down bullies. And when I talked to this school principals at the schools that we work with, some fantastic schools here in the Niagara region, the principals tell me how difficult it is when one of their students is being bullied but it's being done online.

51:05So what a authority does the principal have to shut down an Instagram account or it's really done on Twitter, but Snapchat or TikTok wherever it is, it makes it much easier to bully without having repercussions, which means it's an attractive option. Fortunately, the data shows that the kids who bully the most online are the same kids who are bullying in person. So it hasn't encouraged these kids who I would say are probably not low in honesty humility to suddenly start taking up bullying. But it has made it much harder for us to prevent cases of bullying where the bullies are smart enough. It's not a giant leap of intelligence to say, okay, but it's making an enormous account.

51:53Yeah, exactly. There's nothing that they can do compared to if you slam a kid into a locker in front of the teacher. And so that aspect has certainly been very toxic. The general dynamics of social media are especially for girls' toxic. It's not my area of specialty, but one of the interesting things we found looking at data from pre -to -post pandemic is that girls suffered a higher decline in mental health and boys. And we think part of that is because of how much time they spend on social media. And we know young boys and social media, I can see it in my sons, they do the same sort of thing that we did when you're little.

52:37Play video games with their friends, they're yelling at each other, are you idiot when you do that? No, you shot me, you picked up my health pack. But it's the same sort of thing they'd probably be doing if they're in the room together. We'll spend a lot more time doing social comparison. And those algorithms don't show you a balanced view of life. They show the worst or the best, you know, the most sensationalized views which make girls more vulnerable for the effects of bullying as victims. You're not just comparing yourself to the best looking girl at school. You're comparing yourself to the best looking girls on the internet, which is not a fair or smart comparison to be making and the kind of media that they use is more conducive to that kind of bullying than it is in the social media that boys tend to use.

53:34Yeah, it's a, I had Jean Twangy on the show recently, and the lady that wrote I, Jan, and her new book, Generations. And it's not good, man. It's like, what is it? 60 % of teenage girls say that they have persistent or regular feelings of hopelessness. It's just such a dark statistic.

53:54The weird thing is that it's such a high number of girls, unless you're saying that 60 % of the girls are being bullied by 40 % of the girls, which I wouldn't imagine that 40 % of all girls are bullies, especially not up against this other group, it's just like an ambient,

54:14permeated, displeasure that everybody feels. It's not done by somebody. It's baked into the code and the experience of the technology itself, which makes it even worse. At least you could do an intervention with the individuals if it was coming from individuals, but if it's coming from the medium that you exist in, that's even harder. Looking at modern civilization then, school we've spoken about in awful lot today, compared to an ancestral lifestyle have we created an environment which is more conducive to bullying, is school a perfect storm for bullying? Yes and no. It's certainly yes. Yes, one of the things that mediates bullying and Peter Gray wrote a really nice series of articles about this is you have mixed aged and often mixed sex play in hunter -gatherer groups.

55:12For most times of the year, almost all hunter -gatherers live in small bands in about 20 to 25 and then seasonally when times are good, they get together with the extended family, 150 for a few months. So most of the time you only have, you know, say half the group or kids, you've got 12 kids to pick from. So it's harder to have these isolated cleats. Everybody sort of has to get along. And the mix -age play reduces the need to show off. The 12 -year -old doesn't need to show that they're better than they're 8 -year -old cousin. right? That's it's a given and the 12 year old boy isn't as motivated to compete against a 12 year old girl.

55:55Right. So because each cohort that would be competing for status and is sufficiently similar in status for bullying to be a useful tool is so small, there is basically no point in but there's one person from this age and this age and this age and going to be related. So that's kin selection. So that's a break on attacking copies of your genes and other bodies. So those are reasons why I think modern society, and as well, you'd have adults who step in. You're motivated to step in. And we know that one of the big factors that motivates teachers is whether they feel a motivated, be competent, intervening.

56:44Whereas in the past, you'd be living with your aunts and they would have no problem saying knock that off. In large part because that sort of behavior is rarely tolerated. The downside to ancestral environments is that the stakes could be potentially higher. So if you and I were siblings and there's one piece of meat, yes you have 50 % of my genes, but I have 100%. So unless I'm saving two of my brothers, I should be bullying to get that meat. And so the competition in that sense could be life or death, which would increase the benefit of engaging in bullying. So my guess is that bullying was probably less common in the past, but when it did happen, it had the potential to become very serious.

57:32I want to talk about some interventions and stuff now. So you mentioned there one of the challenges that teachers face on and so forth. There's a quote from you which I really liked which was bullying is neither in 18 or learned but it is the interaction between two natural predispositions, selfless versus selfish and our individual environments, the households we grow up in for instance, promote or hinder these predispositions. That's why it's possible to reduce bullying but challenging to do so. What have you learned about interventions that work, what is bad, what is bad, what is good, why to teach us struggle, why to parents struggle, etc.

58:09Yeah, that's, you know, in some ways the million dollar question. And when I tell my students about development, the two things I tell them, the big class that I teach on development is, number one, we don't have brains this big to find food and avoid predators. We have brains this big to figure out how to interact and compete against other brains this big. It's the only reason we have big brains. So it's going to be complicated. Number one. And number two, development is never nature versus nurture. It's always the combination of the two. So what's more important in making a chocolate chip cookie?

58:43Having chocolate chips or having another, like the nature ingredients or the environment, you need both. And every child is the product of both. So I don't believe in pure determinism, either from the environments or genetics. Having said that, some kids are going to come with different ingredients. Some kids are going to be having different previous positions and some kids are obviously going to come from different ovens, different environments. And so some of the things that we've seen are that purely social interventions where we rely on kids just plain learning don't work. And my favorite example of that was in Norway where the father of bullying research, Dan Olves integrated a huge program where every level of government from federal to whatever the version of provincial or state is, to city, to schools, to parents, all got in and everybody cracked down on bullying.

59:39And they reduced bullying by something like 30 to 40 percent, one of the biggest reductions we've seen at a large scale ever. That worked really well for three years and then what did the government do? It's expensive, so the government said, hey, this problem's done. Stop spending money on it. And bullying shot right back up to normal. which is a really strong argument against it being learned. Because if this was a learn, purely learned behavior, kids would have seen low levels of bullying for years, and they would have just stuck with that behavior. The fact that pop back up suggests that it's really this cost benefit.

1:00:14So that's where the better programs are aimed at. So one of the more widely distributed ones, and then I'll talk about the one that we're promoting, is Kiva, done by Christina Salmavali and some other Finnish folk that's now gone across the world. And it relies on peers to knock down bullying. Say, this isn't cool, it's not effective. We're not going to give you status and popularity. And it knocks down bullying by about 20 -25%. Really interestingly though, they found that it only works on low and medium popularity bullies. probably a lot of the belief victims. When the bullies are high in popularity, their peers don't impact them, which makes sense.

1:00:59The popular kids aren't going to listen to what a group of well -meaning and path -mid -popularity kids are telling them. And the problem is, most bullying is done by really popular kids. So it's very hard to change peer behavior when the leaders of the peers are the ones who are doing the behavior. So that's a limitation of peer -based interventions. We've tried something called the meaningful roles, which is an attempt to try and give students some way of meeting their goals that they want their predispositions. So that kid who's low in honesty humility is arrogant, wants attention, wants to be at the top, find a way of a keeping them busy so they're not able to believe They don't have time, but also be that they're able to meet that goal.

1:01:49And so one of the things that we do is we assign a variety of jobs to different people in the class. And we think that being the Walmart door -grader is not a high -status thing. But if you're a 13 -year -old in grade eight and everybody who comes in the class, you say, hi, welcome to Mrs. Smith's grade eight class. And they have to say hi back. You're getting a lot of social spotlight on you, a lot of attention. And so in a way, you're getting that status and visibility that you want in a pro -social way. And we found that reduces overall school violence by 70%. So you're giving them a way of getting what they want without harming others.

1:02:35Some people say, is that rewarding believes? And that's a tricky thing because in a way we are. But the hope is that over time, and we know personality is fixed either personality is a previous position, not a destiny, that they start shifting towards a more pro -social way. Realizing, hey, I can get what I want and still be kind to others. And I think we really need that combination of the character of the stick because overall bullying interventions have largely failed miserably. It's a very hard behavior to get rid of, which suggests we need these really multi -pronged, multimodal interventions.

1:03:18And of course, it doesn't help that in the adult world, kids see all kinds of examples of people getting away with bullying and getting great things. Donald Trump, whatever you like him or not, I think he's a fantastic example of Billy who's been very successful. He's got millions, if not billions of dollars, married three supermodels as six kids and reputation and dominance became the president of the United States. He ticked the boxes for how being aggressive and kicking down can work. And he's not the only one. There's lots of celebrities and sports in media that show that being mean can work.

1:04:02And so even if we have a perfect school intervention, if kids are learning that okay, when you hit Wall Street, you have to be ruthless. Care out other people's throats. Once they see their parents playing in their sports league and you know, stomping on the competition or cheating on their taxes, doing whatever they can to get ahead. kids are going to copy that. So it's a really difficult behavior to get rid of because there's not only genetic predispositions but there's so many examples in the environment of how being a bully can be effective. Have you been able to track whether or not bullying has increased long be tune -le, because I would grow science my way into saying that because we see in popular media now, at least on the surface, more dark triad adjacent type behavior, people being backed by tea, reality television, that kind of trend of like proximal, like ancillary to psychopathy, macchivalianism, manipulative type stuff, that that would have trickled down to more young people seeing that as a path to success.

1:05:22Is that something you've seen? Is it trending up? Is it trending down? In Canada, the data that I'm aware of, and these are data from tens of thousands of kids. Over the last 20 years, despite bully interventions at every school and lots of those bullying awareness days, we have a pink shirt day, etc. So lots of interventions. The number of people who say that they bully others has decreased by 20%. The number of kids who say that they've been victimized hasn't changed at all. And I think that's because of these opposing forces. That we are trying to make inroads. Kids today are more empathic.

1:06:02There's a really neat study I just read that over the last 50 years people have become more generous in economic games in prisoners there's dilemma. So there's an argument to be made that we're more cooperative than we were 50, 60 years ago in general. But there's also many of these examples of these hyper competitive individuals and hyper competitive media incentives that are still creating a lane for kids who think that they can really do well by bullying others. Is the implication there that the number of bullies has reduced or the number of people who say that they bully has reduced? We don't know.

1:06:45It's a great question. Buying little bastards that they are. You know, one of the things that I often hear is you're setting on a sea humility and how do you expect people who are low in honesty? To do self -report appropriately. Yeah, get fucked, honey. But they admit to a lot of stuff. You'll have, once you give Anne on Emory, they'll admit to bullying, they'll admit to dating violence. If we don't do it in the high schools, but if you go on universities, they'll admit to rape, abuse, they'll admit to serious stuff. If it's anonymous, if you made them stand up in front of the class, don't. Everybody put your hand up that's been a rape of this.

1:07:28Yeah, I imagine that that's that's not exactly going to happen very commonly. What about for does punishment work? Like are there any punishments that work to disincentivize bullies? For getting rehabilitation, just simply encouraging them to stop doing it. Does anything work? Yeah, but I've always said it's a cost -benefit behavior and that these kids are behaving rationally or, you know, adaptively. And so if you increase the cost, it makes you less likely to do the behavior. We know that the very best defense against bullying is retaliation fighting back. We also know that the very worst thing for escalating bullying is fighting back.

1:08:12It's double edge. And that if you are able to deter the bully and they say like, okay, geez, this is too tough of a net to crack, then they'll find somebody else. But if you do it in a way that say shows up the Well, then they have to give up everything they got or they double down and they double down and it gets much worse. So direct retaliation, which is what most people, kids and adults say to do, is very risky. It's high risk, high reward. The study in the in Norway shows that if everybody clamps down, you can reduce bullying. But you're, if you only focus on the negatives, you know, I joke with the school board and with my colleagues that I used to be invited to you lots of schools to talk about bullying.

1:09:00But now that my message is, bullying will get you sex, power, popularity and resources. And this is the next bit. And we have a hard time catching you and prosecuting you. So please don't do it. I don't get invited to a lot of school doing the work. which is the other part of it. It's really hard to find them. That same BBC style video documentary of these kids filming them in school yard, showed that adults were present only 20 % of the time, so kids know not to do it in front of adults. And 10 % of the time, or sorry, half the time that it was there, so 10 % of total, 50 % of the time that an adult was there, adult did nothing about it.

1:09:43So kids know that adults are going to miss a lot of this. Is there an element there that when the adult is around, there's a selection bias that the kid who is doing the bullying is more likely to be the one that's maybe a bit likeable, they're probably socially a little bit more adept. The kid that is being picked on is the one that's maybe a bit less likeable, they're a bit weird, the adult doesn't really feel as much of benefit, how much does that contribute, do you think? Huge. And we've done some informal studies on this. I've never had the time to sit down and do a formal study. But I guarantee, well, I should say I guarantee.

1:10:18I'm very confident that the stereotype of a bully of being lonely, poor self -esteem, bad social skills came from school teachers and principals catching the bully victims. These kids who really do come from a broken home have bad social skills, and they've solve everything with your fists. Right, yeah. But whereas the kids who come from those affluent homes who are heading up, it could be the chess club or the cheerleading team who are really popular in the class have good social skills, they don't get caught. And when they do, they say, oh, we were just kidding, we're teasing, we're so sorry.

1:10:55We never do that. We're sorry. And Jonathan's always been a little bit weird. He just doesn't really understand what's going on. Yeah, exactly. So it is absolutely skewed by that. And not to mention that their parents are more likely to be wealthy, which means more likely to make a fuss. And their parents probably have the kind of personality that would be likely to make a fuss rather than say to their kid, okay, I'm gonna take this seriously. Yeah, it's a difficult one, eh. Trying to pass apart all of that. Again, I'm always going to have a soft spot for the victim of the bullying because that was me for a long time, especially the person that would have been super socially inept, that would have been catastrophically unlikable to probably most of the adults that were around me because I was just struggling to do the social thing.

1:11:51And I can remember a time, there was this one time during drama class and I hadn't, I'd done my homework and one of the bullies hadn't done his and he snatched mine off me and said that he was going to hand it in as his, and then need me in the head, and then I was upset because I just got need in the head. And I got sent out of the class because I was making a fuss, and he'd managed to not only take my homework, but also worm his way into the drama teacher sending me away. So, yeah, I think it's such a double edged sword that lack of social capacity as a young kid, because not only does it make you more vulnerable and likely to being a victim of bullying, it makes you less adept at being able to explain to the people in power what's happening, it makes you less believable, there's probably less sympathy generally that's just being pushed your way because you don't have those those sorts of skills.

1:12:44You mentioned before about this double edged sort of fighting back, it's both the best and the worst response that you can give. In what ways can fighting back be done in a manner which will make it more likely to be a good response and less likely to be a bad response. The best thing to do is to recognize that this is a cowardly unfair fight. This isn't two guys squaring off in the octagon in a sanctioned fight to see who's toughest. This is an MMA fighter picking on some guy on the street and doesn't even know what's happening. And the MMA fighter's got five buddies behind him. So bringing in support, changing the power and balance by bringing in adults, bringing in friends, you change it to an arena where you have some power, and preferably do it privately.

1:13:37I wouldn't advise kids to fight back, but if you're going to do it, don't do it publicly. I've written a couple articles or opinions op -eds on Putin, now he looks just like a school yard bully. And the problem he has is the same as school yard bullies. If he backs down now, He loses a ton of his credit. Is it such a public audience that's watching, right? Obviously it's okay. So if you were to fight the bully in the school yard or your kid was to fight the bully in the school yard in front of everybody else, it's not even though you might think, you know, you could bro psychology your way into believing that sends a message to him and his fucking friends that they shouldn't do it again.

1:14:18But what you've done is you've caused that bully to lose a ton of status in front of the people that are the most important, whereas if you're to see him on the walk home, if this physical intervention or whatever, like standing up to him is going to happen, doing it where they're not going to lose face is actually a much more effective way to do it because it may be a final full stop that they can bow out of whilst being relatively costless to them. Yeah, exactly. And it's one of the ironic things that people who are low in agreeableness, I'm a little low in agreeableness as my whole family is, the joke was don't poke a vogue.

1:15:00We make, and I sense probably there's a little bit of that you, because these are the kind of people who are high in age, which is humble in me to say, but low in A, make good crusaders. The people who stand up for other people don't tolerate injustice, do not put up with people taking advantage of others. But we've seen from victims in schools, victims in workplaces and whistleblowers that often blows back against the person who's reacting back. So they'll say, why is he flipping out? But the other person's really calm, Tony or Chris is really upset. Well, he's upset because he got me in the head.

1:15:39Tony's upset because this person was bullying a graduate student, don't even, didn't like it, but all they see is one of us yelling. And that's one of the skills that bullies have is very quickly pivoting. So it looks like the person fighting back is the one who's the aggressive one. They're being unreasonable. You can see how unreasonable they're being. Okay, so what would you say to parents? Let's say that there is a parent listening whose kid is either or first a bully and second being bullied. What are your best piece of advice for them. Yeah, first for the parent whose kid is being a bully, they're being a coward, they're engaging in a behavior that is going to likely keep happening in life.

1:16:23So they'll behave this way with their siblings, they'll behave this way with you. When you get older and you're elderly, they'll behave this way in the workplace, they'll behave this way with their spouse, they'll behave this way with this kid. So if you don't want to live around a bully for the rest of your life, step in and intervene. And you know, recognizing that 20 % of kids do this, I mean, it's not, these kids aren't psychopaths. You know, your kid is not irredeemable or, you know, going down a difficult path. And I don't want to say that all psychopaths are irredeemable. But I'm just trying to not catastrophize it.

1:16:54But take it very seriously. If you have any kind of sense of fairness and ethics, your kid is breaking the rules. And you can't let them do that. for and don't buy their excuses. That'd be the other thing that we've been saying, which I think parents would have been gotten, is if your kid is willing to believe, they're probably willing to lie about it. What's the intervention? What do you say to your kid? It depends on the specific child and what they're doing. I'd first ask, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? Do you know that there's a power imbalance? Do you know that this is really weak?

1:17:29You know, this is not something I support. It's a moral -based one that's aiming to change, the underlying honesty humility. In the short run, we know that monitoring works, so keeping a tighter leash on them until you have confidence that they're not doing it, is effective following up with the teachers, telling the teachers that you know this, and that you're happy to be contacted if anything comes up again. It is again ratcheting up that monitoring system so that you're essentially making more costly for them to engage in that behavior. They're not going to be believed that they say they were just teasing.

1:18:04They're going to get caught, they're going to get punished. And then if they do well, reward them, you know, as I said, care at a stick. If it's been two, three months and you legitimately have the sense that things have gone better, then you don't have to take them out for ice cream, praise them, tell them that you're proud that they've changed, they're being more mature. That's the way that good people and good societies work. And then if your child is being victimized, and the first and most important thing, especially with adolescents, is trying to have open lines of communication. And I've got a 20 -year -old, a 14 -year -old, so I'm well aware of how challenging it can be to communicate with adolescents at times.

1:18:49But the more you're able to do that, the more you're likely to hear about the victimization or see changes relating to it, which are commonly symptoms of anxiety or depression that increase and in particular desire to not go to the place where bullying is happening, to no longer want to go to school, I just need a day off, sick, etc. And that's a real red flag to jump in and get involved because the bully has chosen this person. I can't emphasize that enough that almost every bully strategically chooses a victim who can't effectively fight back. So it's very rare that if they picked on somebody who could potentially punch their way out, they would probably bully them in a way that if they did that, it would be really bad.

1:19:38So bring a girl with him. So boy, I need a girl to use a guy. So what is he going to do with a punch to girl? Then everybody knows this guy's a psycho and he's lost the fight. So number one, lines of communication. Number two, contact the school and make sure they take it seriously. There's far too many people who think that bullying is a right of passage. And the analogy I like to use is that conflict like exercise strengthens you. So you know that if you exercise and you stress your bones they get stronger. But if you have too much stress and you break a bone, that bone is never as strong as it was when it was, you know, whole before it was broken.

1:20:19And the same thing happens to bullying. If you have severe bullying, other researchers have shown that it affects your immune response for decades. It affects the expression of your genes for decades. It's not a minor thing. It's not a right -of -passage. And if your child has been chosen as a victim, it's usually flight back. Because they can't. The bully is most cases they have found a way to prevent the victim from doing that. So bring in allies, you know, the school, the teachers, if they have any friends, that's really important. If they don't have a lot of friends, go out of your way to try and help them make friends.

1:21:03We know that having friends doesn't reduce bullying dramatically, it's about 10 -20 % but what it does do dramatically is reduces the long -term impacts of bullying. Because if you're 13 or 14, you're a teenager, and your peers are telling you you're worthless, either directly or implicitly by bullying you. It doesn't really help to hear from mom and dad say you're a fine, lovely person, or your grandma or your aunt to say it. You really need to hear that from peers. And so having even just one friend cuts the odds of serious mental health outcomes by over 50%. So, get involved, listen to your kid, and get them support.

1:21:48What are the potential serious mental health outcomes from somebody that is being bullied and it's untreated, but you know what I mean? Yeah, it's lifelong, lifelong risks of depression and anxiety. And of course, we've seen, unfortunately, a number of tragic incidents that result in suicide. some of the murder suicides and school shootings have been blamed on bullying. But we certainly know there's many more kids who are dying on their own hands because they can't take it. And of course that's an area where the internet has become particularly pernicious or dangerous. It's because it doesn't go away.

1:22:31You know, if back in my day, you know, I went to school in the 80s or early 90s, If you were bullied at school, which I really wasn't, but if you were, you know, you could go home and you'd have a sanctuary from all of that. Now you can't. It's on your phone. It's on the message. It's on the boards. And so you're putting your child in a place where they're fighting an unfair battle against people who are actively trying to hurt them. I can't imagine as a parent anything that would motivate me more strongly to stand up and say get lost, which is ultimately why I went down this road of research.

1:23:11It's really not fair to the kids who are being picked on. What about getting your kids to do some sort of team sport, getting them involved at a local either team sport or maybe a boxing gym as well? I guess that's probably a pretty common response from parents. You know, anything that you can do to help offset the anxiety and the depression will help exercise is fantastic and building those friendships is really useful. Sports, I always tell my grad students that everything's great, other than the shirt, nothing's black and white, because sports can sometimes be a risk. And we've looked at bullying in sports and have found that for girls it can be a risk factor.

1:24:01If you participate in competitive sports, both in the sport and outside. And for boys it depends on the sports and the team. Our local hockey team just had its captain and his brother barred from the lead for bullying other players on the team. It's another area that you need to be aware of. But anything, even if it's not a team sport, if your child likes, I don't know, dancing, or wants to learn to play the guitar, anything that will help alleviate that, including if necessary, switching schools, getting away from it. If your child is stuck in a toxic situation where people are picking on them like it's an episode of Orange is the new black, get them out of that situation.

1:24:50However you can. Here's the thing that's interesting, man. I've seen pretty much both ends of the status spectrum. In school was probably the most, close to the most pitiful person there, had the lowest number of friends, was smart or whatever, and I was always going to go to college in and university, but in an area that wasn't very, very common. And then through probably 16, 17 was kind of a middling, 18, 19, 20, very, very quickly ascended to be one of the best known people in a city that's got a million people in it. By 223, I'm doing reality TV, I'm on TV all the time. Then 27, I have another crack at reality TV all through this period, I've been the guy in the front door of a nightclub.

1:25:37And then now from doing the show, which is, you know, transcended to this much more kind of global, I get widespread type of status, I've seen both ends of it and observing the texture of my own mind, especially through this evolution relends, is fucking wild. Like I know what it feels like to be so, like, downtrodden and self -deprecating and lost and alone and not just in solitude, because solitude is okay, but in like a band and feels like a band and so I really have seen this fucking trajectory, man, I'm telling you from like the absolute bottom of the bottom of the bottom to now, you know, being somebody that's relatively well known.

1:26:27And yet crazy, I totally understand how it could know, in girls, especially if it's a lot of social bullying can even mess with their menstrual cycle, you can stop them from releasing eggs. That's one of the suggested reasons for why women have got concealed ovulation is that it means that other women can't go and fuck with her to stop this egg from releasing, because if you did, that's basically like a big flag of, I'm fertile and you can come and mess it up if you come over here. So yeah, I really do kind of see this. Just how important it is. The reason that it got me thinking about that was I wondered whether some sort of sense of mastery.

1:27:16So the difference that I had, or the thing that I guess kind of ripped me out of, apart from aging out of kids that are just brutal and awful and being kind of pressed into a school, which is a perfect environment, somewhere between a prison and a drama class to enact this. The other thing that happened was I gained competence in areas that was valued by other people, which caused me to rise up through the status hierarchy, which meant that who's going to bully me, right? Like they need to get into my nightclub, or they, you know, they want me to shout them out on Instagram, or whatever. Like I'm aware that it's not the same as love, but it's a protect, it's like a prophylactic against somebody bullying you because of status.

1:27:58So I wonder whether, whether it's the boxing or the playing piano, or the violin or the doing whatever. Some sense of mastery downstream from that is going to get you status. Now obviously there's certain stuff that's super lame. If you learn the trombone or something, I wouldn't imagine that it's particularly protective. It's just like sucks as an instrument. But if you do something which is cool and you encourage your kids to go and be good at a thing, that was the problem that I had as well. I was very, very, very good at cricket. That was my sport of choice. I played six, seven nights a week every single summer.

1:28:37I got time off school to go and play which obviously I loved But it was a sport. It was like from the most working class town in all of England playing the most aristocratic bourgeois wanky Sport that you can think of So I didn't get I didn't get any status from it. It's like the rugby players and the football players got state It's the cricket people it's like who the fuck plays cricket. There's like three people that play cricket in the school So even the thing that I did that was good, my thinking being if you can try and maybe reverse engineers something that's at the intersection of your kids' interests, what they like to do, and also what you could perhaps reasonably predict would cause them to gain in a little bit of status or whatever, that might be an interesting potential pathway for them.

1:29:22Yeah, I think that's a really good general approach for many things in life, is to build on your children's interest, create self -esteem, it helps create resilience because life is going to knock you down, whether it's bullies or otherwise, and having that reservoir of confidence and self -belief is really useful. And that does come from mastery. It is something that is certainly important to transmit, it helps with that sense of self -worth. So I would absolutely endorse that. The only limitation, of course, is it's not doing anything to stop the ongoing stress from the bullying if it's ongoing.

1:30:03It's going to take you a while to get mastery at fucking playing the guitar or boxing or whatever. And your story reminds me of a really tragic video from that BBC style filming. And it's a group of girls, grade sixes, who are standing in a circle and they're kicking a great five -girl in the ground. Just like stopping the crap out of her. Teacher walks by with the little girls holding her hands and great twos or threes, which a lot of school year teachers do. They play with the cute little kids. The kids are smart enough to stop. So the girl gets up and goes away. 30 seconds later, the girl comes back and they grab her, throw her to the ground and start kicking her again.

1:30:47And you're thinking, why ain't God's name would you go back? And it's because as humans being alone is a death sentence. So she would rather be with friends, or she would rather be with enemies that were bullying her than on her own with no one around. Yeah. And then the best part of it is at the end, some dad or something walks through just looks, keeps walking. It sees it happen, keeps walking by. Oh, man. Yeah, I mean, that's a, that's a difficult one. I don't, I don't have kids yet, but I can't wait to be a dad. and when I am, it's gonna bring up, I know that it's gonna bring up a lot of challenges for me because my The chip on my shoulder that I've worked very hard to try and get rid of It's gonna come back, you know if I see another kid being bullied if I find out that my child either is a victim or is doing it I'm not going to be as impartial and as rational and as balanced as I should be and that's and it's like a I don't know, seeing a tsunami on the horizon, because every kid, I would imagine that some ungodly proportion of children will encounter some form of bullying at some point in their time in school.

1:31:5980 % of kids encounter some form of bullying. So yeah, and you know, you're going to find out about this. And I'm going to have this, you know, a good bit of self -work and a good bit of personal development really be tested. It's going to stress test just whether a thousand sessions of meditation has made a difference or not because I'm going to be like, well, fuck, here I am, I'm 12 years old again and I hate my life. Yeah, that's, he's the other thing as well that I've taken away. I mean, I found your work absolutely fascinating and evolution relends for such a common problem which is so formative in people's lives, I think is just phenomenal.

1:32:39The other thing that I've taken away and And this maybe legitimates part of the chip on my shoulder that I always had. I always used to be resentful of the kids that were bullies because it felt like they were given an extra degree of an excuse for their behavior from the teachers that I was never given. The teachers almost saw the propensity, this disposition that the kids had that were being mean and I could get my homework stolen and need in the head and drama class and I would get sent to the head teacher but if I was talking a little bit too loudly in class I would also be punished and I remember thinking at the time like this just feels so unfair.

1:33:22It feels so unfair that I'm given less sympathy and also held to a higher standard and I've always, always hated, absolutely ardently hated, using excuses like, well, you know, he comes from a broken home, or well, you know, she's going through a rough time of it at the moment. And, you know, I would have had to swallow it, had your data set otherwise. But with this, it's no, it is very much a conscious choice, which is only mildly influenced by the environment that the person is in. You know, if this kid decides to enact bullying, it is a conscious choice, and it is not them calling out for help, it is not them enacting rage from inside of the house.

1:34:13It's them trying to gain fucking status. They want to climb the social ladder in the same way as schmoozing and taking a client out for a dinner in 20 years time is going to be the same. They're just doing this, and that makes it... It makes it so much more Machiavellian, and it makes it so much less desperate. Yeah, it gives me, it's annoying but vindicating because at least it makes me kind of feel like the presupposition that I had as a kid was somewhat accurate. Yeah, and I would say that, if you're looking for a little sound bite lip here, that I think that bullies are behaving like selfish assholes and like all other selfish assholes whether they're narcissists, macchi avalians, psychopaths, they're ruining it for everybody.

1:35:07I have no patience for that behavior. Now of course everybody at some point unless you're a saint does something bad. So I don't want to be rock bottom, agreeableness, hexagulators and never forgive anybody but for the people who are doing it regularly just to benefit for themselves, fuck you. We're standing up to you. You're not doing it. And the ironic thing about it is that in the long run, the data is also really clear that the best way to be popular and liked is to be powerful and kind. Those are the people. It's not a shock, but it surprises me how beliefs overlook that. That if you really want to be not just popular, but people want to hang around you and want to be with you and you're enduringly thought of in a good way, you have to be kind.

1:35:59So ultimately, they're trying to take a shortcut to just get what they need for their own selfish needs. And in the long run, I think it's going to burn them. Tony Volk, ladies and gentlemen, Tony, I absolutely adore your work. I think this is fascinating. You've got like a million other things that I want to talk to you about. So let's line up and talk about psychopathy or personality or something else soon. If the people that are listening think that they want to learn more about the work that you do and your lab and stuff, where should they go? Yeah, as I said, I generally stay off social media, but if you Google me, Tony, T -O -N -Y, Vogue, Visa, Victor, O -L -K, on Google, you'll get one of my research lab pages and then look it up and send me an email if you like it and touch.

1:36:42Damn right, Tony, I appreciate the hell out of you. Thank you, man. No problem, great chatty.